Social Change: Desire, Design and Composition

Description of the Course

Mark — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:43:45 +0000

The Evergreen State College is a peculiar school. In a gorgeous physical environment where everything is either a tree or not a tree, and the sun comes out just in time to set, the academic environment is primarily interdisciplinary. Not interdisciplinary as a fringe alternative—it’s the main approach. They’re on a quarter system, and each quarter most students enroll in a single course referred to as a “program” taught collaboratively by at least two professors from different fields—geology and sculpture, music and mathematics, poli sci and forestry. Thus when Arun Chandra facilitated the invitation of Susan Parenti, Rob Scott, Danielle Chynoweth and me for a 10-week group residency as Evans Scholars, we expected to make a seamless translation of a School for Designing a Society session into a Evergreen program. As it turned out, we collaborated on a quilt that was all seams.

The program was titled Social Change: Desire, Design and Composition, a Freshman course that was designed to include: introduction of terms and concepts of composition, design, change, society, language critique, performance; groups meeting to formulate and focus on several large-scale social problems; groups meeting to elicit statements of desire for social change; groups to collaborate on the composition of a mid-quarter medium-switching performance; groups to design social interventions encountering several social problem areas; an international conference on health care system design—and groups creating performances to present at the conference. In addition, the heuristics of the class were framed by a performance of music and theater by the Illinois entourage the first week and a performance potluck by Evergreen students (including a production of Kenneth Gaburo’s Maledetto) the final week.

The design groups—in the areas of Care, Participation, Environment and Education—produced 2 booklets: “Participation Patterns” and “Unheard-of Schools and Other Educational Kinks”; a set of satiric and tragic performances on concepts of waste; and formulations and metaphorical bandages addressing the need for care. For a substantial number of students, the presentation of their pieces in the context of the health care conference, which was attended by doctors, nurses, naturopathy students, health care activists acutely aware of systemic problems of health care delivery, contributed to 3-day Aha! moment where the sense that performance, desire, formulation could nudge in the direction of solving the not-yet-solved became palpable.

Final Performances

Rob — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:22:57 +0000

Reading Rainbow

Rob — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:10:33 +0000

Here is a list of the books read by members of the class. Email me if you would like a copy of one of the papers for use in your design group or in general.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (Janice)
Gesundheit by Patch Adams (Trevor)
Ceremonial Chemistry by Thomas Szasz (Aba)
The Panic Broadcast by Howard Koch (Roy)
The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt (Erica)
Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison (Chloe)
Welcome to the Terrordome by David Zirin (Derick)
Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana (Trent)
The Working Landscape by Peter F. Cannavò (Michael M.)
The Music Lesson by Victor Wooten (Jordan)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire (Clayton)
Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh (Greg)
The Theories of Claude Debussy by Leon Vallas (Ben Kapp)
Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana (Ben Farr)
Dwellers in the Land by Kirkpatrick Sale (Sean)
Caring by Nel Noddings (Michael Z.)
Earth in Mind by David Orr (Claire)
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (Auben)
Learning All The Time by John Holt (Paris)
Farenheight 451 by Ray Bradbury (Lauren)
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek (Andy)
Bodies That Matter by Judith Butler (Valerie)
15 zines from Sabat (Juli)
Silence by John Cage (Gordon)
Where the Roots Reach for Water by Jeffrey Smith (Camille)
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander (Yael)
Language and Responsibility by Noam Chomsky (Will Adams)
Jesus Freaks by Don Lattin (Will Ides)

Information Theory

Rob — Thu, 13 May 2010 02:01:17 +0000

Arun sent this today. –Rob

Here are some articles on the topics that were brought up in class over the past two days.

Susan spoke on Monday about “ITA” (my image of the way “things” are) and “ITB” (my image of how I would prefer “things” to be). These are described in more detail in an essay by Herbert Brun called “The Need of Cognition for the Cognition of Needs.”

Mark spoke today of “the retardation of decay”. The mathematical theory of information was an attempt at specifying the relationship between “information”, its “communication channel”, and measuring the capacity of a communication channel. This theory is described in an essay by Warren Weaver from about 1948.

Herbert Brün described “the retardation of decay” and its relationship to anticommunication in a number of different articles. On of them is “For Anticommunication.”

-Arun

Example of a Rube Goldberg Machine

Rob — Wed, 12 May 2010 00:40:45 +0000

OK, this is an example of a Rube Goldberg Machine, created as a music video for a commercial rock band.

Zizek

Rob — Tue, 04 May 2010 23:35:27 +0000

Andy and Derick recommended this piece today.

Autonomia

Rob — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 07:19:45 +0000

Lotringer, Sylvère and Christian Marazzi. (Eds.) 2007. Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Please read the attached excerpt for Monday.
I’ll provide some context for this in class:

Autonomy (excerpt): pdf or doc

Fiat Has Branded Me
Autoreduction Movements in Turin
Lama Sabachthani
Painted Politics
Nonviolence in Bologna

Ideas to consider when designing an action or ongoing project

Rob — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:51:58 +0000

Here’s the pdf of the booklet that Jason circulated today in class.

PERTURBATION is when an interaction triggers a system to change state in such a way that it remains the kind of system that it is.

Ideas to consider…
by Jason Marrero
April 20, 2010

A Grassroots Approach to Job Creation

Rob — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 07:55:09 +0000

Arun sends along this piece produced by Al Jazeera (a secular Qatari News Service) for The Nation Magazine.

The Cleveland Model: A Grassroots Approach to Job Creation
by Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard & Thad Williamson
April 12, 2010
The Nation Magazine

2nd Garbage Patch: Atlantic

Rob — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:09:57 +0000

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Researchers are warning of a new blight on the ocean: a swirl of confetti-like plastic debris stretching over thousands of square miles (kilometers) in a remote expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.

The floating garbage — hard to spot from the surface and spun together by a vortex of currents — was documented by two groups of scientists who trawled the sea between scenic Bermuda and Portugal’s mid-Atlantic Azores islands.

“We found the great Atlantic garbage patch,” said Anna Cummins, who collected plastic samples on a sailing voyage in February.

Read the rest of this story